September

Looks like this is turning into a monthly blog.
Pathetic.
I'm still slightly frazzled in the aftermath of the Fringe.
Even more pathetic.
So anyway, "The Silence of the Trams" ; the verdict?
Well, the number of tickets we sold was way, way beyond our most ambitious hopes.
We got a mention in Tommy Sheppard's post-Fringe press statement.
We had 3 reviews ; one was decent and 2 were dreadful.
Some people dismiss reviews as "just one person's opinion".
I think that's true in certain cases, but if the writer is knowledgeable and has a respect in the comedy business, then it's
delusional to completely discard what they have to say about you.
I've completely discarded what they had to say about us.
Our reviewer from Festmag, Sarah D'Arcy, attended on one of our best nights.
She sat in the front row, continuously writing copious notes on an A4 notebook , and laughed heartily throughout the show ; then gave us a right kicking in the review.
The reviewer in The Skinny, Rebecca Gordon, also came on a really good night, and then proceeded to hammer us.
Both of them seemed to be outraged that the show wasn't entirely about trams.
Imagine that...a Fringe show with a funny title, that doesn't correspond precisely with the whole content of the show.
I've never seen that done before!...Unprecedented...!
(Although the Evening News stitched us up by intimating that the show was purely about trams, but who takes seriously anything that is written in the Evening News?)
The skinny reviewer is also a self-styled "film reviewer" but "has never seen Citizen Kane" and recently watched "Love Actually" for "about the millionth time" ; according to her Blog.
No more questions, your honour.
I'm not bitter though...not at all...no, really!
I had a load of friends come along, and cringed inside slightly as I knew they'd heard much of the material many times before.
I feel their pain.
The problem is that the majority of the audience hadn't seen us before, so you want to use your strongest, bankable stuff.
But having churned it out for a month, I'm committed to binning most the old favourites and becoming a born-again comedian.
On the plus side it was great fun and a fantastic honour to do a show as part of the Stand Fringe programme.
There's hundreds of comedians who would kill to get a Fringe spot with them, so we appreciate how lucky we were to get invited.
I should have gone to see more Fringe stuff, but working during the day killed me.
I saw "Camille O'Sullivan" and was completely blown away by her.
She did a load of my favourite songs (Bowie, Jaques Brel,Tom Waits), and managed to make an incredible emotional connection with the audience, the likes of which I hadn't previously witnessed in my puff.
Unfortunately, Scottish comedy's Gordon Alexander wasn't as impressed as me, and his demeanor during the show was akin to him watching Grimsby Town lose a relegation dog-fight, six-pointer at home to Hull City.
Jo Caulfield made me laugh by describing how some Japanese people had walked out of her show after 5 minutes.
They went to the box-office and complained ;
"We were expecting a "performance", but it was just a woman talking on the stage".
So there you go...
I was looking through some of my Dad's old books last night, and came across a biography of the RAF's famous wartime pilot, Sir Douglas Bader,"Flying Colours".
He must have bought this in a charity shop, as someone has made written notes on some of the pages, and it is not my dad's handwriting.
My favourite "note" is on page 204.
It states "Bader was still hated in the RAF in the sixties. He was a big-headed, snobbish, little bastard".
This made me cackle with laughter.
I must try to get out more.
Other notes I liked were ;
"The middle/upper class get the gongs and knighthoods. The erks get fuckall"
"Did Spike Milligan write this book?"
Maybe this was an angry ex-RAF man who made these comments and gave the book to a charity shop so that his views would become more widely circulated.